Re: <nettime> Harassing People for Watching a Movie in a Cinema

[Flick Harrison <flick@flickharrison.com>]

There are some updates and further reading at that link.  The agents were
Homeland Security.

http://the-gadgeteer.com/2014/01/20/amc-movie-theater-calls-fbi-to-arrest-a-google-glass-user/

Most disturbing is:  Why is DHS getting involved in a minor piracy
situation?  I mean, the quality of google glass recording is no threat to
anyone's business model at the moment, let alone national fucking security.

BUT ON THE OTHER HAND, I hate to sound like a crypto-fascist, but isn't it
idiotic to walk into a movie theatre with Google Glass on your face?
Telling everyone about it who works there?  I mean, they are supposed to
just believe that you have a camera pointed at the screen but you swear
it's turned off, officer?

Why not walk into a bank with a ski mask on, because it's so cold out?  "I
got my rights, coppers!!"

I've heard plenty of stories of meek artists being physically assaulted by
police, etc, for minor pseudo-offences, old ladies being tasered, children
crushed to suffocation in prisons by over-zealous guards etc... but this
story doesn't upset me nearly as much because the guy was being a dick, and
all he got was a tough interrogation.  

Prescription google glass?  Talk about a wanker.  Perhaps even a
livestreaming wanker.

I think wistfully of the scene in 1984 where Winston Smith knows he isn't
being recorded... because all the trees around him are "too small to
conceal a microphone."

I believe in the right to videotape in public, and I also understand that
everyone has a right to record their own private interactions for evidence,
or journaling, or whatever.  But even a simple zoom lens or parabolic
microphone takes away the other persons' right to decide whether they are
sharing with you, or are in their own private space.

Do we all have to assume that we are always being recorded now, even in
private, in the dark, even if there are no cameras visible?  It's not a
totalitarian state, though the fear is the same... we need a new word for
it... maybe Panoptic is good enough, but it's not the authorities we need
to fear, it's innumerable competing interests - blackmailers shooting women
on their hijacked webcams, activists trying to trip us up and use our every
utterance to further their agendas, cops hoping to build dossiers about our
organizations, kids trying to provoke teachers into youtube meltdowns.

Maybe Rob Ford is actually the new superhero of our age.  He's developed
the only moral framework that can survive such relentless scrutiny - and
that is, no moral framework at all.  Deliver for your constituents (the
angry white men, in his case) and no behavioural goof-up can sway their
loyalty.  They don't care what you are filmed doing, as long as you keep
serving their interests.

-Flick

-- 
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http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison 

* FLICK's WEBSITE: 
http://www.flickharrison.com

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